5th Chamber Concert
Richard Strauss: »Metamorphoses« (Version for String Sextet) / Béla Bartók: String Quartet No. 2 op. 17 / Wolfgang Rihm: »Scraps« for String Quartet (excerpts)
Alter Saal
»Metamorphoses«: Richard Strauss writes the work under the impressions shortly before the end of the Second World War and understands it as a farewell to the world and his art. He was in a »desperate mood! (...) All gone!« he writes to the Viennese writer Joseph Gregor. At the end he quotes the funeral march from Beethoven's »Eroica«.
Béla Bartók's 2nd String Quartet was also written in catastrophic times: Composed in the middle of the First World War, it is considered the high point of Bartók's »expressionist phase«.
»Scraps« (Fetzen) are, as the name says: scraps. That is, parts, tears, bits, frayed, incomplete. (...) The verb ›fetzen‹, rather colloquially, indicates – in relation to music – that things sometimes get ›fetzig‹, (groovy)« says Wolfgang Rihm about his 1999 piece.